The first two seasons were a strange blend of melodrama (that almost bordered on parody given some of the bad acting), quirky comedy, murder mystery, some supernatural elements and a dose of that Lynch surrealism.

The movie Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me jettisoned most of the quirkiness and melodrama in favor of a darker tone and more surrealism and the revival series has really pushed it in that direction.

It's basically the film equivalent of abstract art. It has scenes that seem to have no purpose beyond establishing tone, pacing that can be hard for some to handleand doesn't answer every question neatly nor does it wrap everything up in a nice little bow. The show challenges the viewer to interpret what they have seen.

All in all, Twin Peaks as a whole is an odd piece of work and it's one of those love it or hate it things. If it appeals to your sensibilities, it's an amazing thing, if it doesn't, it looks like crap.

I was enough of a fan of the original show to look forward to the revival, but I loved the revival so much I retroactively liked the original less. Even before the show went off the rails in its second season, it devoted too much time for my taste to satirizing soap opera conventions with such precision the satire often vanished. So I was happy the revival turned out so bizarre and unexpected. But I can't blame anyone who hated it, since it was so bizarre and unexpected.

That's the thing, though. Nobody should have been surprised with how the revival turned out. Lynch famously hated the second season of the show and as I noted above, he moved the work in another direction when he did the movie. People who were expecting it to be more like the original show weren't paying attention to what Lynch was up to.

As for the original series, I rewatched it in anticipation of the revival and was struck with the realization that it was about 50 percent crap and 50 percent brilliant. The new series has a much better crap/brilliant ratio.

I agree on the relative crap/brilliance, although I think you're a little kind to the original. Season 1, with three Lynch-directed hours out of eight, comes closest to your 50/50 and maybe scores a bit higher on the good end.

Season 2... even Lynch's five hours (out of 22) are spotty. The episode where Laura Palmer's killer is revealed and strikes again is half-amazing, half-terrible; same with the season finale.

I think this latest, and presumably final, season will be warmly remembered for Kyle MacLachlan's performance(s).

Presumably some enterprising fans are already at work on a fanedit a la "Northwest Passage" that boils the season down to just the parts people care about. I figure the Roadhouse scenes will be the first to go, although the criteria for keeping whatever essential is left will be something unknowable and utterly idiosyncratic to the faneditor.

It's basically the film equivalent of abstract art. It has scenes that seem to have no purpose beyond establishing tone, pacing that can be hard for some to handleand doesn't answer every question neatly nor does it wrap everything up in a nice little bow. The show challenges the viewer to interpret what they have seen.

•••

I now cast Lynch as the TV avatar of Jackson Pollack, and TWIN PEAKS becomes a gigantic con job. It's a variant on "The Emperor's New Clothes". People are fearful of saying "Well, this is just stupid" lest they appear stupid themselves.

Part of it is "You had to be there." The original series, when it originally aired and I originally watched it, was very much playing off of tropes that were common at the time in nighttime soaps, ala Dallas, Dynasty, and Falcon Crest. Those references are mostly lost on a new audience 25+ years later. Also, most of the things Twin Peaks did on network TV back then which were bold and innovative at the time now seem de rigueur, ala the police procedural elements, the quirkiness, etc. So to a new audience, it doesn't seem unique as it did at the time.

Additionally, what gave the show its cult following, of which I've been a part since the original show, is that it was incomplete. The final episode was deliberately filmed as a series of cliffhangers that would never be resolved. Then the movie that everyone thought would answer the questions turned out to be a dark, disturbing prequel that just added new ones.

So Twin Peaks was like 750 pieces of a 1000 piece puzzle, with 100 of those pieces looking like they belonged to a completely different puzzle at that. So we spent years on Usenet, in chat rooms, and other online forums discussing and debating how to put those pieces together and fill in the blanks. The Return was very much in this spirit. It expanded the puzzle to 2000 pieces, and gave us about 750 more to work with.

I think that's the attraction, the incompleteness that invites debate, discussion, and theorizing.

I'm a big Twin Peaks and David Lynch fan, but even I came out of this series having some mixed feelings. I think just the tiniest efforts to match the aesthetics and music and tone of the original (heck, or even Fire Walk With Me) would have gone a long way to placate a lot of the hate I'm seeing in the Twin Peaks fan community. I'm not in the "hate" camp by any measure, but ultimately I am a little let down by the denouement/reset that occurred in episode 18. I think it could have been compelling if it really had been set up in an elegant way, but very little about Twin Peaks: The Return was elegant. It was shot as an 18 hour movie and then chopped up into episodes post-facto. Even that wouldn't have disturbed me, but then continuity is a huge mess, and it's easy for Lynch to say that he doesn't bother with things like continuity, but so often it was clear by things as simple as what characters were wearing, that we were seeing something shot on another day. We had footage re-used to fill up time, we had 7 minutes of someone sweeping a floor. We had all of those random Roadhouse conversations that ended up not tying into the story at all.

Originally this was going to be 9 hours long and then Lynch demanded 18 hours. It really feels to me that they had a 9 hour script that was coherent, and Lynch added 9 hours of his own stuff to it. There are so many scenes that are beautiful and moving and amazing, and there are others that are mind-numbingly out of place. The defenders say "Lynch being Lynch" which is another thing that is easy to put out there, but it doesn't really address the issues.

I will still buy the Blu-Ray so maybe I'm the right kind of sucker for this show. I do know that I'll be getting rid of Showtime tomorrow. If there's a season 4, I'll watch it, but probably with a lot less ardor.

I now cast Lynch as the TV avatar of Jackson Pollack, and TWIN PEAKS becomes a gigantic con job. It's a variant on "The Emperor's New Clothes". People are fearful of saying "Well, this is just stupid" lest they appear stupid themselves.

This is perfect. I loathe all such examples in fiction, where people bend over backwards to overlook obvious shortcomings or pretentious trappings.

If there's a season 4, I'll watch it, but probably with a lot less ardor.

+++

I am on the same boat Jozef.

Personally, I feel that Lynch was disrespectful with his audience to say the least. One thing is not tying things up, filling the last episode with 20 minutes of road driving scenes with meaningless dialogues is something entirely different. I would be interested on a season 4, but I would prefer to have Lynch out of the equation.

Sabrina Sutherland (producer, close collaborator with Lynch) did a AMA on Reddit today. She blew off many of the questions with "We need to maintain some mystery" but I was disappointed that she even blew off questions about specific continuity issues. (costumes changing between scenes for no reason, that sort of thing).

She said that Annie was never in the script, which was why they never asked Heather Graham to participate. She said they asked Michael Anderson (the little man from another place) to do it and he turned them down.

The big reveal for me, though, was that after Lynch and Frost created the initial draft of the script, Frost stopped with the day to day collaboration and went to work on Secret History of Twin Peaks, leaving Lynch to keep writing/re-writing. I think that explains a LOT of what we saw on the screen.

Back before the show premiered, Lynch was interviewed by Entertainment Weekly and when he was asked about the level of collaboration between himself and Frost, he said "we wrote it together and that's it". So the season itself was plotted by both but everything else, from visuals to the pacing to the staging were all Lynch. Frost did make a cameo in one episode reprising his role from the original series. He was the guy walking his dog in the woods who came across Gersten and Becky's husband during their odd little freak out in the woods.

Yup, I knew all of that. But "writing it together" can imply a lot of different things. I'm starting to believe the people who say that Lynch/Frost wrote a tightly plotted 9 episode series, and then Lynch doubled the length to 18 episodes with his own material. There are already people talking about making fan-edits.

In my opinion, Kyle Maclachlan is the main reason for the appeal, great acting in all episodes. Season 3 was a fantastic achievement for him. The plot was terrible, but he nailed every single time he was on screen. Fantastic actor.

I thought the last three episodes were excellent - the shows have not been far from my thoughts since they aired. I found them to be exhilarating TV. Episode 17 wrapped up the Twin Peaks we know from the original series, and episode 18 was closer in tone to the current series. While I love the mystery of the series, I think the characters and story were equally compelling - Coop uses the knowledge and power he gained in the Black Lodge to save Laura by altering the timeline. But he doesn't count on the consequences, and he doesn't count on Sarah Palmer.

I find the idea of a fan edit about as appealing as letting Diane Keaton direct an episode - you will get a watered down version of David Lynch. I'm about sick to death of fans who think they can ape an artist's style better than the artist - that usually means the fan is in love with the artist's work from a different time. TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN is not just the culmination of the series, it evokes Lynch's work since the series folded so many years ago.

If you are looking for a satisfying, Hero's Journey wrap up to the story, you shouldn't look to David Lynch. By having Coop come out of the Black Lodge after 25 years, you have a protagonist who has been trapped in a dream world, and he brings with him dreamlike elements that are far from clear. Episode 17 shows how he has mastered the dream world, but episode 18 shows how nobody can master a shifting and changing time and reality. Coop thinks he has a firm grasp of reality, but it slips through his fingers.

Lynch's work is already dreamlike, and I feel the end of this show is some of his most accomplished work since LOST HIGHWAY.

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